On Jan 28, 2023, at 18:06, Peter Hirst <peter.p.hirst@...> wrote:

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[Edited Message Follows]

Karina:

A very good question.?? And a very telling? way of putting? it: "who to operate the Park?"? Who indeed?? Very telling, and sad that this is a legitimate way to ask the question.? The answer should be that US Congress made that decision back in 1916.? Legally, historically and unquestionably, the National Park service is charged with running? the Park through,? the Superintendent and her staff.? Period, full stop.? Aramark, the principal concessionaire would love to have you believe they run the Park, and frame every bit of their advertising ? as if not only do they run it but it is theirs to run.? It is not and they should not.? The Park Service is to run it and everything that happens in it is their responsibility.?

As concessionaire, Aramark is a commercial company under contract to run the inherently commercial facilities: restaurants and hotels, primarily, but has time goes on, that franchise creeps into more and more Park operations, most notably park transportation i.e. the "Shuttles".? And herein lies the problem.? Since the shuttles are provided free to the public, they are not a profit center for Aramark,? They are part of the cost of its getting the more lucrative operations, such as the $500 per night Awhahnee, the $50 entrees. the $5.00 cokes and completely bizarre mystery meals served to long lines running past empty serving stations at the Curry Village commissary.? They are providing services not to us but to the Park Service.? The Park Service runs it supposedly in the public interestand Aramark is supposed to provide services better and more reasonably than the Park service could.

But Aramark, like its recent predecessors, is not interested in providing service, it is interested in profits.? Stephen Mather's original idea was that this would work on the regulated monopoly model of public utilities, where in return for a reasonable profit, the company would provide? the highest practicable service for the lowest reasonable price.? And when the Curry and Tressider families, who go back in Yosemite history to about 1897, were running the Curry Camping Company and then the Yosemite Park and Curry Company, they had a vested family interest in stewardship of the trust they held to provide these services.? The beginning of the end came in 1072, with the death of Mary Curry Tressider, last of the family line and the salw of Yosemite Park and Curry Company to a long succession of essentially real estate investors none of whom had any ties or interest with the park other than the purely commercial, i.e. to ptovode the leas amount of service at the highest possible price.

Eventually even the Park and Curry Company ceased to exist, and the concession contract itself was passed to the notorious Delaware North Corporation, which most observers thought could not be outdone in incompetence, greed and exploitation of the Park resources.? We have been shocked, I tell you, shocked to discover that yes, it could get worse.?

In the first week after Aramark took over, its senior executive in charge its Park operations proudly posted a video of himself driving golf balls from his new front lawn out into? Ahwahnee Meadow, joking that heard them bouncing off Half Dome. He was bounced a few days later, but the tone and ethic he set in those first few days was not.? It has been all downhill since.